Long time no post; I've been posting everything to my weblog for quite a while instead. ;)

However, I'm back, for 1 posting only; this weblog posting details how we don't need PKI to do an anti-spam web of trust. Advo is the One True Home of WoT schemes, everyone knows that ;), hence I'm posting a link here. But I'd really love it if some of the WoT gurus could do some brain-dumping on how distribution of a WoT could work...

I just posted this on taint.org, but it's the kind of thing I usually post to this Advo diary instead (since it deals with code and free software). So I'll post it here too ;)

<bigwig> is a really interesting new design for web services. A month or 2 ago, I was thinking about web app languages, like perl/CGI, PHP, servlets, HTML::Mason, etc., and I realised that the big problem was the requirement imposed by the web environment itself; most "interesting" operations often have a UI that needs to take place over several pages, and each page has to

• unmarshal the user's CGI params, decode them, check them for insecurity, validity etc.;
• open the database;
• perform actions;
• fill out the HTML template (I'm assuming nobody's insane enough to still use embedded HTML-in-code!);
• insert "next step" form data in that template;
• send that back to the user;
• save a little state to the database;
• then exit, and forget all in-memory state.

When compared to most interactive programs now, it's clear that this is a totally different, and much more laborious, way to write code. The nearest thing in trad apps is the "callback" way to deal with non-blocking I/O, ie. what we used before we could (a) use threads (b) use processes or (c) wrap it up in a more friendly library to do that. It just screams complexity.

<bigwig> fixes that:

Rather than producing a single HTML page and then terminating as CGI scripts or Servlets, each session thread may involve multiple client interactions while maintaining data that is local to that thread.

They call it The Session-Centered Approach.

It gets better. They also include built-in support for input validation, HTML output validation, compilation and compile-time code checking, and it's GPLed free software. This is really good stuff. Next time I have to write a web app, I'll be using this.

Found via sweetcode.

Doc quotes:

The great teacher John Taylor Gatto said this about how he learned to truly teach:

I dropped the idea that I was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself.

s/children/users/, for all those people who take the BOFH stories a bit literally.

Replies:

thom: travelling? I was in Sydney for ~6 months, went to Melbourne for two weeks, stayed in Byron for 3 days, then stopped in Brisbane for 7 weeks... Now I'm off back to Sydney... Some traveller, me.

I can top that. Thailand, 3 weeks, Melbourne, er, 4 months ;). I am planning to get moving again soon though, otherwise my Official Traveller Certification will be rendered null and void. Also I'll be thoroughly pissed off if I don't get to try out my new diving sk1llz on the Great Barrier Reef while I'm over here.

gary: Saw Chris Raettig's journal the other day and was impressed; his rationale for an email based journal is appealing [..].

I use a mail-based system to update taint.org, my (other) blog. It works nicely -- the main point was to see how useful WebMake would be for blogging -- but I'm now reverting to using Advogato for diary stuff, keeping taint.org for interesting newsy snippets. Go figure. I reckon it's because Advogato's more of a diary-based community, whereas taint.org is kinda out on its own, and just doesn't seem like a good place to keep a proper journal.

ask: Jabber [..] Maybe it's just crappy clients, but it doesn't seem stable enough to run anything too critical on.

That's the same feeling I got about 6 months ago. :( Let's hope it polishes up some time soon. Open source != crappy packaging!

MailMan-to-RSS:

Oh -- another new hack I forgot to mention, which someone might find useful. MailMan-to-RSS, a little script (and a vaguely nice-looking demo site) which scrapes MailMan list archives and creates an RSS feed of the last 10 posted messages. Handy for following lists using any of the various portal systems (and Evolution!) that support RSS.

BTW as the page sez, if you would like to see a list RSS-ized, and don't have a server to host the RSS on, mail me and I'd be happy to add it to the scraped list on taint.org.

Oh look, thom is travelling 'round Oz too! cool. Must get back to the "travelling" part myself someday soon though.

BTW forgot to plug the Sub-Pixel Font Positioning on UNIX mini-HOWTO I wrote a few weeks ago. It really just ties up the loose ends in XFree86 4 doco, covers the implementation details, and gives UNIX-users something to point at when Windoze lusers rattle on about ClearType. ;) Sub-pixel positioning is a total beaut tweak for a laptop screen.